Sockeye Salmon & Bison

In reading the Vancouver Sun editorial about the Cohen report dealing with the uncertain future of wild salmon on the BC coast, I could not help but think of parallels in our national experience with bison -- in particular, the so-called disappearance of the bison from the plains of North America.

To me, the parallels are striking.  In the case of salmon, the word 'decline' has been substituted for the word 'disappearance', the latter of which was for years associated with the almost-complete annihilation of the bison.

We now acknowledge that the elimination of the bison was in large part the result of systematic, quasi-industrial killing efforts, erasing the wild order and replacing it with cattle & grain production, railroads, residential communities and fences.  This is not to mention explicit public policy efforts to starve First Nations populations onto reserves.

Over the intervening years, with regard to the uncertain future of wild salmon, our society has learned to be somewhat more subtle in its approach to the destruction of the wild.  But not a lot different.  Me-first competition among the various fishing interests, introduction of competing but artificial aquaculture, habitat destruction through urban and commercial development, all look to me a lot like what happened to the bison.  We even have rough parallels with regard to the economic and social effects on First Nations of our area.

Perhaps this ongoing assault on the wild is inevitable.  But we ought not to pretend that we are mystified by what is happening.

Seniors Learning

I think the video at the link below is worth sharing:

http://youtu.be/9asb_iISKio

Educational Myopia

"What are you going to do with your degree?"

This is an astonishingly common question asked of people engaged in university education.  I will leave aside the matter that such a question seems to imply that a degree is equivalent to some sort of tool, a hammer or a wrench or the like.  But the question does imply a belief in the mind of the questioners, that all university education ought to represent the educational equivalent of direct career training. 

Of course, there are some university programs that do function in this way, medicine leaps to mind, and engineering, as do more-recently created programs related to the business field. 

But such direct career purposes are not the roots of university education in its classic form, unless one assumes that most original undergraduate education was part of an apprenticeship for a career in academia itself.

Our son graduated this spring from an undergraduate program in human kinetics.  When first registering at university, he had not established any kind of clear learning focus, so he started out in general arts.  After two years of study, he found an interest in human kinetics and moved to that program.  He was, however, constantly bombarded with the question above.  His responses were always vague.

In his final term of study, he took on a part-time, minimum-wage job in the shipping and receiving department of a large retail chain.  As he graduated and summer approached, a manager approached him to ask if he would be interested in entering a short training experience aimed at being an appliance salesperson.  After some consideration, he decided to go ahead with this plan, and in the middle of this month will assume a full-time position as part of the retailer's appliance sales staff.

Many of his student colleagues who graduated at the same time, and some who graduated earlier (his studies took an extra year due to the change in programs of study) remain unemployed.  Interestingly, these same former student colleagues are somewhat dismissive of his current occupation, implying that he has 'wasted' his university education.  Indeed, when we proudly tell family and friends about our son's current employment, generally the reaction also seems to suggest that this must be somewhat disappointing after five years of university education.  For us, quite the contrary.

First, in the employment world of today (and possibly even of yesterday), it is unlikely that any particular work situation will necessarily represent a particular restrictive career path.  Data supports the notion that people will have many major changes in employment over their lifetime.

Secondly, we never assumed that the primary reason he was attending university (regardless of the program in which he ended up), was instrumental training for a particular entry-level job.  We did have a sense that the general learning related to becoming university educated would end up serving him well as he tried to find a future place in the world of full adulthood.

Let me give some examples of how I think this worked:

- His involvement in drama in high school was never intended to ensure that he could pursue a career as professional actor (although this was not excluded); it did, however, give him a boost in self confidence, and the ability to work with others, and to gain comfort in standing out in front of others.

- His involvement in soccer helped to develop his team skills, and ensured that his lifestyle included physical activity.  It also helped build self confidence (albeit including some experiences with bullying) and evolve some leadership skills

- His general experience as a university student helped him to break out of being a dependent child to an independent adult.  He had to learn to assume personal responsibility, to meet deadlines, to organize for success, to deal with failure, and on and on and on.  Oh, yes, he also had to meet the prescribed formal learning outcomes as well.

- As an arts student, he had to accomplish the foregoing, as well as build his capacity to write coherently; he had to build his capacity think in some orderly fashion; he had to enhance his capacity to be mindful and sometimes to think in a constructively critical fashion.

- As a human kinetics student, he had to learn to organize and make presentations; he had to work cooperatively with other students in prescribed activities; he learned about important life skills such as promotion of healthy, active living  and nutrition-related topics.

- And as an emerging adult, he had to learn to manage his finances and to do his grocery shopping, to make his own meals, and to negotiate his way through living in shared accommodation, finding out how to register for utilities, and negotiate rental arrangements for accommodation.

Now he is gainfully employed and finding out what it takes to get along as a responsible adult and member of society.

I think his university education has served him very well thus far, even though some short-sighted folks may not believe that he is actually 'using' his degree.

Economies of Scale and Tainted Beef

Was reading more this morning about the tainted beef recall from the XL Foods meat packing plant in Alberta. Apparently this plant is the second largest in Canada. The slogan is: "Big Enough to Supply; Small Enough to Serve".

The article I was reading indicated this plant, which employs about 2000 people was built to take advantage of 'economies of scale'.

The 'economies of scale' notion is, of course, one which emerged with the industrial revolution, and is suggested as a positive driver of business. As a holder of a business degree myself, I know that when economies of scale are talked about, there is never any real talk about 'disasters of scale'. However, in this case, again we can see a mega disaster in action with all the accompanying costs; and the people who are now sick, and the out-of work employees, in military terms, are probably 'collatoral damage'.... unless you happen to be one of them.

In 1982, the author Kirkpatrick Sale authored the book, "Human Scale", in which he suggested that there is an appropriate maximum size for all human undertakings; and that when considering the idea of 'progress', we ought to think about the ecological implications of making things too big.

This XL case might be just another example that we ought to look seriously at the ideas Sale expressed (think about the recent financial system meltdown, Toyota's accelerator pedal recalls, the BP oil spill, etc.). All such events suggest that we might be well served by a more complex understanding of the idea of economies of scale and the accompanying costs.

On the weekend I was in a Pub in Vancouver, British Columbia.  On the food menu it was interesting to see items featured, proudly proclaiming to be made with Alberta beef.  I suspect that the original 'economies of scale' are currently meaning something different to this pub and others like it.  Tainted meat is now tainted brand.

Who Is Funding Your Interest Group, And To What Extent?

 You may ask: who is Vivian Krause?

She claims to be a freelance researcher who apparently is responsible for investigating the funding of environmental groups in Canada, and for 'discovering' that some portion of the funding for some of the larger groups comes from sister organizations in the United States. The environmental "terrorists", according to the Harper government.

If we accept her findings at face value, the first comment I can think of is that, if the corporate buzzword from the 80s and 90s was 'globalization', why would this idea not also be an organizing notion for interest groups such as Green Peace and others?

My second reaction is to wonder who is funding Vivian. In an article in the Vancouver Province newspaper, May 10, 2012, by Sam Cooper, the reporter, indicates the following:

"[Krause] insists that she has no connection to any of the resource industries — oil, forestry, mining, farmed salmon — that her research appears to support. But after going ahead with research, she has received thousands of dollars in honorarium payments from some of these industry groups for conference speeches. And she has worked briefly as a federal Conservative staffer and unsuccessfully sought funding support for oil industry issues, Krause says."

In reading information presented through today's media, my sense is that it is always helpful to have a sense of who is funding whom.

I am currently funded by the Federal government (OAS) as well as my own retirement funds, including CPP -- ah yes, and supplemented by a very considerate spouse who continues to toil for a salary in the mines of the literate. So, you see, I am in part funded by the federal Conservatives as well..... at least for the time being.

"Subdued Economy" and/or "Waiting for Godot"

For some time now, I have been thinking that the columnists and economic pundits who keep writing hopefully about the end of the recession and the pending economic turnaround may well be wrong.

There is no particular news in the idea that people are poor at predicting the future.  But for a long time, it has seemed to me that such prognosticators believe if they wish/forecast loudly and persistently enough, they will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  For them, this is best exemplified by a return to the hyperbolic economic opportunities that have characterized our recent economic past.

At the moment, there is a kind of earnest intensity within the popular economic wisdom, in trying to blow the embers of the current "subdued economy" into the kind of hydrocarbon-based, economic flaring that western capitalism has experienced since World War II.

But what if that past fifty years was an economic aberration?  What if the past fifty years was not just another cycle in the longer-term historic economic conditions of human kind?

Thomas Malthus notwithstanding, and current deniers aside, we do appear to be fast approaching the limits of human population growth.  Not in terms of geography, but in terms of resources, environment, and perhaps of potential for pandemics of one sort or another.  Even the potential for global social discord seems too loom.  The pervasive nature of social media have really changed the rules of the game of articulating interests.

The techno-fix(es) has thus far created as many (if not more) problems than it has solved.  Stephen Hawking, in celebrating his 70th birthday, is reported to have stated:   "We must also continue to go into space for the future of humanity, I don't think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet."

This is a fine techno-fix sentiment; but the limits of our planet and the speed with which we are sullying our current base in the universe, probably gives humanity considerably less than 1000 years in order to achieve escape velocity, let alone to find some other resource horizon.  We might be better served in the near term by looking at how to effectively manage what we have, rather than for resolution through inter-galactic means.

Perhaps there is a not-so-hidden message in the state of our current "subdued economy".  Perhaps the message to all of us is that we ought not to be trying to return to the overheated economic nature of the past fifty years.  Perhaps we need to experience and hone our human capacities within a subdued economic understanding.

I wonder what subdued economy(ies) might look like?

Clearly there are those who panic at the thought of such a notion.  Canada's federal minister of natural resources seems to be of this ilk.  The viewpoint of Canada's federal government, as conveyed through this minister's open letter about pipeline development to the west coast has a hysterical tone.  The notion that Canadians and others in the global community might mindfully consider how we will go forward economically, apparently strikes this minister as 'radical'. 

I feel as if I am watching two men on a bench.  The minister's views have overtones of role of Lucky.